1: “Monday, July 1st, 1776, began hot and steamy in Philadelphia, and before the morning was ended a full-scale summer storm would break,” David McCullough writes in his book John Adams.

John Adams, then one of Massachusetts’s delegates to the Second Continental Congress, was up before sunrise.

Early that morning, he wrote a long letter to Archibald Bulloch, the new president of Georgia: “This morning is assigned … continue reading

1: Theodore Roosevelt spent almost every day of his childhood fighting severe asthma.

“Despite his privileged birth, his life hung in a precarious balance—the attacks were an almost nightly near-death experience,” writes Ryan Holiday in The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph. “Tall, gangly, and frail, the slightest exertion would upset the entire balance and leave him bedridden for weeks.”

When he was twelve, … continue reading